The development of medical technology solutions has accelerated – they cover an increasing number of areas and work with huge volumes of data. In addition, user expectations are changing. UX/UI specialists and developers of medtech systems are faced with the difficult task of creating a human-centric and intuitive interface for complex and voluminous solutions. Let’s consider the basic principles of designing various medical systems.
Today, the MedTech market includes several classes of solutions – these are, for example, electronic integrated medical records, medical information systems for healthcare institutions, analytical solutions, and mobile applications.
Depending on which of them a particular development belongs to, different approaches are used to design its UX/UI design. However, in each case, it is important first of all to formulate the correct business logic for the solution. It is inextricably linked with the regulatory documentation based on which a medical organization operates, as well as with the processes of routing patients within the region. Understanding what the interface of a system – developed for a specific region or an individual medical institution – will look like is only possible with complete immersion in the subject area it covers.
Therefore, special UI/UX design agencies for the healthcare industry have appeared on the market, which deals exclusively with interfaces for the medical field.
Integrated electronic medical record
The regional IEMR service acts as a data showcase for aggregating and displaying information about a patient’s disease to doctors. The main principle when visualizing this data is a very compact arrangement for maximum information content and reducing time for studying it. The main techniques used are playing with font sizes, grouping methods, and using non-standard screen shapes. The font size depends on the degree of significance of the indicators. To highlight key parameters, pictures, icons or stylized drawings of human organs can be used. Non-standard screen forms help the user to pay attention to an element of the system that is important for him from the point of view of information consumption.
Specialized centralized regional information systems
If we are talking about specialized regional subsystems that operate for all medical institutions of the subject, then here, first of all, the question arises about the business processes of providing medical care. It is important that the system meets the objectives of medical organizations and harmoniously integrates into the daily work of medical facility specialists.
Interfaces of specialized subsystems are designed taking into account the rather long visual load of users – their design should be as calm and restrained as possible. Working with such a subsystem should not require lengthy training, and the interface should be simple so that a specialist can quickly understand the functions and use cases.
Analytical solutions
When developing analytical solutions for healthcare problems, companies tend to focus on the latest trends in visualization: they are set by world leaders in the field of BI, for example, Tableau and Microsoft.
Here medicine is practically no different from other areas. We visualize data using standard widgets that are familiar to any person: for example, a Sankey diagram for visualizing the flow of patients through medical organizations. The treemap is the most popular diagram for visualizing trading on the stock exchange: it is published during the opening of trading and shows the direction of market movement by sector. For us, Treemap works great as a tool for visualizing the most common malignant neoplasms. The size of the square in this diagram corresponds to the prevalence of a particular cancer in the region.
Mobile applications
Mobile applications help users receive any services related to health care. These can be questionnaires, questionnaires, or applications that are integrated with smart gadgets. For example, a glucometer, which measures blood glucose levels, or a pulse oximeter, which determines saturation levels and heart rate.
There are no super-complex tasks for a UI/UX designer here because often such applications solve one specific problem. Accordingly, the simpler their interface is, the more convenient it will be for the user to interact with them. All remaining functions are usually transferred to the application settings, which the user usually interacts with once when launching the gadget.
Conclusion
Market leaders are now striving to bring all products to a single design system so that healthcare professionals can navigate the different modules and solutions perfectly. It is important that different types of customers (for example, a doctor and an employee of the Ministry of Health) can find something in common in different interfaces and understand how the systems work.
